Constituents of Shortland Islands in Western Province, Solomon Islands says the absence of a constituency office back at their island is costly for their people.
Speaking on behalf of the people, one of Shortland Islands’ women leaders, Ms Caroline Laore said when it comes to the administrative part; there is always less efficiency and less effectiveness.
Ms Laore states that people’s time and money are wasted just to come to Honiara looking for where the paper trail is. This triggered the call to consider having a constituency office set up in Short land Islands.
“Constituents are leaving in their own homes and busy doing their work every day and they have no time to board the ship and leave their home for two to three weeks looking for where the paper trail is up to, so it’s good to have this constituency office to save peoples time and money.
“2019 is already here and this ineffectiveness should be out of our system, we should have our own constituency office at our place.
“And definitely by having that, it will save families a lot of expenses; they don’t have to travel so far away leaving their families behind just to know what stage the applications have reached.
“We don’t need village committees to make determination as to who get the projects approved and who doesn’t,” she expressed.
In investment case, if a constituency office is placed there, it will help to reduce the system of bias, favoritism, and nepotism and this can fill the gap for accountability and transparency to the people, she added.
“In that sense, we can have a society that is less wrong, and everyone can carefully do their projects well, and feel good about it”.
Meanwhile, Ms Laore said, at the moment there is a lot of unhidden social lose with public funds.
This is because of no proper office for administrations of these funds, she said.
“There haven’t been any office build in short lands ever before up until now, nobody told us anything about that, we didn’t receive any advice or approval or information from the national government but we believe that building a constituency office at our constituency should be the right thing to do,” she stressed